Jessica
Lacher-Feldman spoke on PBO at
The History, Technology and Conservation
of Nineteenth-Century Publishers' Bindings at the
Grolier Club in New York, February 22, 2008. Heldconcurrent
with the exhibition The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life
and Work of Alice C. Morse From
the Collection of Mindell Dubansky, the Guild of Book Workers
will co-sponsor with the Grolier Club a one-day symposium
dedicated to the history, technology and conservation of
nineteenth-Century publishers' bindings.

Publishers'
Bindings Online will be the focus the seminar, Developing
a Collaborative Model for Researching 19th c. Books and
Presenting them to a Larger Audience:
Issues
and Prospects, presented at the Rare
Books and Manuscripts (RBMS) Preconference, "Libraries,
Archives, and Museums in the Twenty-First Century: Intersecting
Missions, Converging Futures?" in Austin, Texas
on June 21, 2006. The seminar will be chaired by
Elaine Smyth
from Louisiana State University (and a member of
the PBO Advisory Committee),
with panelists Barbara Walden (UW-Madison,
PBO co-coordinator), Jessica Lacher-Feldman (UA,
PBO Project Manager), and Sidney
Huttner (University of Iowa, and coordinator of The
Lucille Project).

Jessica
Lacher-Feldman (UA) and Amy Rudersdorf (UW-Madison) gave
a presentation
on the PBO project entitled Publishers'
Bindings Online: Reflecting American History and Culture
via the
WWW at
the American Association
for History and Computing,
Roosevelt University, Schaumburg, Illinois, on April
15, 2005.

Jessica Lacher-Feldman and Kristy Dixon gave a
presentation on the PBO projectentitled 19th
c. Publishers’ Bindings:
A Reflection of American History and Culture via
the WWW at
the American
Historical Association annual meeting, January
6-10, 2005,
Seattle, Washington.

Jessica Lacher-Feldman, Kristy
Dixon, and Eileen Verchot gave a presentation
on the PBO project to the Society
of Alabama Archivists annual meeting, October
8, 2004, Montgomery, Alabama.

Jessica Lacher-Feldman demonstrated the PBO project at
a University of Alabama Libraries Show & Tell, sponsored
by UA Libraries Digital Program Advisory Committee, February
28, 2006.

Jessica Lacher-Feldman, Kristy Dixon, and Erika Pribanic-Smith
demonstrated the PBO project in a presentation entitled Books:
The First Mass Medium to the students in UA's MC409: History
of Mass Communication, Spring 2006.

Jessica Lacher-Feldman presented the PBO project and the
Development of a Digital Project as a New Model for Academic
Librarianship for the IMLS Fellows, School of Library and
Information Studies, at The University of Alabama on October
4, 2005.

Jessica Lacher-Feldman demonstrated the PBO project
in her brown bag lecture, So, What's
Cool at Hoole? A Virtual Tour of the W.S. Hoole Special
Collections Library, sponsored
by the University of Alabama's Women's Resource Center, November
30, 2005.

Mary Alexander (UA) demonstrated the PBO project as part
of the day long workshop she taught, Metadata Beginnings,
November 7, 2005 at the Sterne Library at the University
of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

Barbara
Walden and Tom Durkin gave a presentation to staff of campus
libraries and members of the School of Library and Information
Studies at UW-Madison. The presentation, entitled The
Art of Books: Creating the Publishers' Bindings Online
Database, included an introduction to publishers'
bindings, synergies of the Alabama-Wisconsin partnership,
Web interface,
creation of the database, database contents and searching,
and future plans.

Drawing from the Publishers' Bindings
Online project, this exhibit features books and
detail
images from some of the major artistic styles
of the 19th and early 20th century such as Arts
and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Poster Style, and Japonisme.
Held in part in honor of the 2007 Sakura Festival.

Showcasing
illustrated bindings from books in the collections
of UW-Madison
Libraries, this exhibit highlights the library's
three-year, Institute of Museum and Library Services
grant-funded project to provide a database and
related resources to open the world of these
beautiful objects, once found commonly in American
homes, to a wider audience. Included in the exhibit
are books with designer bindings from the 1890s
and early 1900s, books
from the Civil War and World War I and books
from the mid-nineteenth century whose colorful
bindings and endpapers depicted and enhanced
American's interest in an expanding world.

During July-September 2004, an exhibit
featuring the IMLS project and books selected
for the PBO project
from the Library’s circulating collections and
recent acquisitions was mounted at UW-Madison’s
Memorial Library. This was sponsored by the Silver
Buckle Press,
the library’s
working museum of letterpress printing. A
Web version of the exhibit is in progress.

A selection of 19th century publishers’ bindings
was exhibited in the Gorgas Library on the University
of Alabama campus.
The exhibit included more than seventy books and focused
on publishers’ bindings in a variety of styles and
materials with examples produced from a variety of countries,
including the US, Denmark, Germany, and
Hungary. It served to educate and inform our constituents
about the PBO project.

In
March of 2004, Jessica Lacher-Feldman curated an exhibition Victorian
Exotica: Japanese Design Influence in 19th c. Publishers’ Bindings.
The exhibition featured bindings from the 1850s-1910s
that embody Japanese style and influence.
The exhibit included first editions by Lafcadio Hearn,
as well as cloth bindings with Japanese images.

As
part of
the University's and Tuscaloosa community-wide Sakura
(Cherry Blossom) Festival, this exhibition received
wide publicity
and brought visitors to the Hoole Library from the
University and the community at large, including
visiting students
and faculty from Chiba, Japan.

Notable

In
February, 2008, Publishers’ Bindings Online was
just awarded “Best
Online Archival Exhibition” in the ArchivesNext 2008
Best Archives on the Web Awards!

ArchivesNext is a blog on Archives and web/digital technology
and is coordinated in part by an archivist at the National
Archives. PBO was nominated and voted on by a panel of
judges, all of whom are experienced professionals in the
archival
field.
ArchivesNext (www.archivesnext.com)
is the Archives and Web 2.0 Technologies
blog. PBO will be featured on the
site this coming Wednesday, and will feature a discussion
of what judges thought gave it an edge over other nominees.

Jessica Lacher-Feldman's
article, Publishers' Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art
of Books as a Model for Publicity, Outreach and Promotion
of Digital Projects and Online Resources in Cultural Heritage
Institutions and Academic Libraries was published in the
February, 2007 issue of the Journal of the Association
for History and Computing and is available at http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/2007/issue1/feldman.php The article is meant to serve as a model for digital projects
looking to promote their work in innovative ways.

The PBO project
was featured on the front page of the Max
Kade InstituteFriends Newsletter (V. 15 No. 1 Spring
2006). The article, "Judging Books by their Covers: Online Resource is a Bibliophile's
Dream" by Kevin M. Kurdylo, MKI Librarian highlights
the PBO project and the titles culled from the Max Kade
Institute
for inclusion in the PBO project.

An 11x17 glossy PBO
calendar (September 2005-December 2006) was
created for wide distribution. This free calendar
features sixteen details from PBO books, eight from each
institution. The calendar will be distributed at both
insitutions, and at conferences, meetings, and other
venues throughout the remainder of 2005 and in 2006.

The details reflect the mood of the seasons and represent
the broad range of materials within the PBO project. Featured
are designs by Margaret Armstrong, a first edition of Tom
Sawyer, and a rare tartan cloth binding. Click the thumbnail
for a larger view of the calendar. Please contact
us if you would like to receive a copy of this
calendar.

To date PBO has been featured or reviewed on several websites both
in the US and around the world
including the following:

Publishers' Bindings Online was highlighted in the Jane Hedberg's column "Preservation News" in the June 2005 (Vol. 66, No. 6) issue of College and Research Libraries News.

Publishers'
Bindings Online was featured on the cover
of the Spring 2005 (Vol. 18, No. 2) issue of Library
Horizons, the newsletter of the University of Alabama
Libraries. Library Horizons has a broad readership within
Alabama and beyond. The article featured the graphic from
the PBO homepage, as well as images from three covers included
in the project: Truth Dexter (pba00018), A Warwickshire
Lad(pba00056), and Hubert's Wife: A Story for You [A Southern
Catholic Story](pba00458).

An
image from the PBO project (St. Nicholas,
pba02394) was used as the University Libraries' holiday
card for 2004. The card, which featured a full color image
and descriptive colophon along with the URL for the project,
was distributed to
ARL
Libraries
across
the
United States,
as well as to numerous other parties.

The Winter 2005 issue of Alabama
Heritagemagazine
featured an image (Aunt Patty's
Scrap Bag, pba01251)
from the PBO project in the article "Caroline
Lee Hentz's Long Journey," by Philip D. Beidler.

An article on the PBO project appeared in Issue 33 (May
24, 2004) issue of
Libraries@UW-Madison featuring
information about the project and images from some of the
books to be included in the project.

The PBO project was featured in an article on the AHA
meeting in Seattle in Silverfish,
the official online newsletter of the Association of Library & Information
Science Students (ALISS) at the University of Washington.

Publishers'
Bindings Online was featured on the Librarians'
Index to the Internet on April 14, 2005. A brief
statement about the project appeared there, along with
a link to the project.

Six
books from the project along with supporting information
about
Publishers’ Bindings Online were
featured in a set of three postcards are
used to publicize the events sponsored by the Friends
of the
UW-Madison Libraries.